Little Big Man was a long and winding, but satisfying, read for me. Whether Jack Crabb is a truly credible narrator or not - we are made to wonder right until the end - I feel I have a stronger understanding of American history in the mid-19th-century when the west was being opened up by white settlers, railways were being laid across the country, gold was making men rich and mad, and the Native Americans were fighting their last, fierce battles before being killed off or pushed out and onto reservations.

I love Jack's droll voice, his observations of Cheyenne life and of the wild, colourful characters he encounters. He turns up Zelig-like at great moments of history and has a chance to change history. I think the story has particular interest when he meets up with real figures - Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane and especially General George Custer

- less glamorous in the flesh than in their legends, of course. He has several opportunities, and a great desire, to kill Custer long before his "Last Stand" at Little Big Horn in 1876. In the last few chapters, the whole direction of the novel becomes clear.

Jack joins Custer's troops in that bloody battle, where they are outnumbered and slaughtered by the Cheyenne and Sioux. Jack watched Custer's deluded defeat and is the last man to see him alive. His account is moving and believable. It is no surprise that he is the only survivor of the battle, saved again by the Cheyenne. He manages to have it both ways, somehow retaining a moral neutrality in spite of his constant desertions. He might not be a good man but he is no villain.

For me the book sagged a bit in the middle. Its 422 pages of dense, small type in my edition were just a bit too long, with a few too many events that didn't move the story or Jack's character forward. There's a bit of a shaggy-dog quality to it ("more plot twists than a dog has fleas," commented one of my readers) though it all fits together smoothly and each episode is individually enjoyable.

It takes some suspension of disbelief to accept that our narrator is a 111-year-old man and that he could remember his life in such vivid, coherent detail. But I was willing to do that. I love the short Editor's Epilogue from Ralph Fielding Snell - still one of my favourite elements of the book. He, too, questions whether we can believe Jack. But his evidence that Jack's facts are shaky is very slim and - deliciously - one argument is that Jack says Crazy Horse did not wear a feathered headpiece, whereas Snell owns the very piece and "the dealer who sold it to me is a man of the highest integrity". Right there is amusing proof of how history has been hijacked, commodified, invented and lost in layers of mythology.

Thomas Berger creates his own layers of information and disinformation in a novel with a fictional narrator, a fictional editor, fictional and nonfictional characters and an author who manipulates them all and subtly brings his 20th-century views to bear on their slice of history. We can chew on all this for a long time.

It's a wonderful book that has aged well and, as good books do, has led me to think beyond it. I admitted at the beginning that I was not a fan of most Western movies but found myself watching the 1993 film Geronimo (one of many) on television recently with a closer, more curious eye. Geronimo was the famous Apache leader whose people were the last Indians to surrender formally to the Americans in 1886.

For anyone interested in Custer's Last Stand, I highly recommend The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, a poetic and intensely human novella by the Australian writer Delia Falconer, which was published in 2005 and released this year in a paperback collection with some of her short stories. She tells the story of Frederick Benteen, an offstage character in Little Big Man, who kept his troops back from the suicidal mission of Little Big Horn. History judged him a traitor and a coward, in contrast with Custer's glorious failure, but perhaps he made the right decision in saving his men from certain death. Falconer imagines the private experience and thoughts of Benteen and has men as they wait and prevaricate.

(By the way, Falconer had been working on a novel about Buffalo Bill until she learnt with dismay that Thomas Berger had written about his Wild West shows in his sequel The Return of Little Big Man. I'd still like to see her, no doubt very different, telling of the story.)

How Little Big Man speaks specifically to Australian readers is difficult to sum up. All colonial histories have shared qualities, though each country and each person has a different story. This is a very American tale but one with plenty of lessons and pleasures for us. I hope you enjoyed it and would love to hear your overall reactions.

P.S. Sunday, January 7: Here's a cruel little irony. My favourite aunt (see the previous entry on Books for Christmas) was keen to join the discussion about Little Big Man but, like many of you, had trouble finding a copy. She had a standing request with her local library and rang me today to say she had finally scored an inter-library loan from Willoughby Library. It was the copy I had borrowed, also as an inter-library loan, and returned this week. So I was her blocking agent....I asked her to be a good citizen and rub out my little pencil notes from the margins. And to comment on the book if she still has the drive to read it. Anyone else waiting for a library copy might be lucky in February!

The squad car slithered to a stop in the mud. First one door slammed shut, then another. The bleep-bleep of the car's alarm switching on. Redmond Rowe and Scott South strode across the clearing. Unlike the crisp, still morning a week ago when Judy Pucci's body was found, the abandoned lakeside Sport and Rec camp seemed now to be a hive of activity.

A second murder. A leak to the press. A young constable unrolling yellow-and-black crime scene tape. A sordid, unfolding tale so strange you wouldn't read about it in a newspaper serial.

The flashbulbs of the press photographers pulsed like a silent storm of lightning as the two partners approached. Rowe - Bluey to his mates - stopped next to the zippered bodybag and pulled out a Winfield Blue. He lit up and surveyed the scene, while South spoke in hushed tones to a policewoman nearby. Clint, the now-frazzled make-up artist, was shrieking in the distance, one of the uniform boys dutifully taking down his statement. On fold-out chairs, Homer Brown and Heidi Blum sat in stony silence.

South approached. "It's Prichard," he said. "Decapitated. They put it in the bag, with as much of him as they could reassemble."

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

Bluey sighed. "It doesn't fit," he muttered, crouching. Bluey unzipped the bag and looked down at Pritchard's face, expressionless but for a tinge of sadness, his eyes wide, almost with a sense of understanding.

"He wasn't the killer, that's for sure," Bluey said, looking up. "But he knew more than he was letting on. I wonder ... did he find the killer?"

South looked down at his partner and at the mangled remains of Pritchard. "Either way, the killer certainly found him."

Nathan di Maggio paced outside the trailer, barking into his mobile phone. "This is going to cost, big time," he was yelling. "You send me out to this godforsaken swamp in the middle of the night only to have another body, and another bloody headline, on my hands. I can sell digital watches to the pygmies, but I can't sell Tomorrow Was Mine with the creator of the show in a box and a head writer without a head."

Nathan listened as the president of the network squawked out of the earpiece like audio tape running fast forward. The call went dead. Nathan sighed and looked up. Scott South was standing there, silently, watching him. "Haven't you got a killer to find?" Nathan said, the tension in his voice near breaking point. "I told it all to the constable ... Chip, that work-experience kid, found him. Well, he found the bottom half of him, anyway. They fished the other bits out of the lake."

South looked past di Maggio. He could see Chip in a director's chair, wrapped in a blanket.

"He's in shock," said di Maggio. "And who wouldn't be? First some lunatic kills Judy, and now another death? And what am I supposed to do with them?" he finished, gesturing to the press.
Redmond Rowe leaned back in his chair, the woodwork straining to keep his ample frame at 45 degrees. On the desk, a fresh packet of Winnie Blues, a roast beef roll and a can of Fanta - not everyone's breakfast of choice, but fuel enough to propel Bluey through the tail end of another sleepless night. South was on his way back to the station from the crime scene.

Bluey had been sitting in his office for the best part of an hour, staring intently at the gallery of pictures - Homer Brown and Heidi Blum, the histrionic double act whose marriage was a feat of public relations wizardry; Chip Taylor, the work-experience kid whose job put him everywhere and nowhere; Nathan di Maggio, the hung, highly strung deputy sales director who was bedding the late Judy Pucci; and Clint Nguyen, the taut, fraught make-up artist who was bedding the morally insolvent di Maggio.

On his desk, a stack of files, packed with newspaper cuttings. Absentmindedly he flicked through them. Judy Pucci's humanitarian trip to the Ozarks, 1978. Judy Pucci accepts the Logie for best new talent, 1980. Producer's chair for Pucci on Waterfront Beat, 1983. Judy Pucci's romance with footballer-turned-actor Tony "Blocker" Wood, 1985. Judy Pucci off to India on a journey of spiritual enlightenment, 1986.

Then - curiously - nothing ... until Judy's triumphant return to television in 1988, for the telemovie Hill of Broken Dreams. Pucci, doubling as producer, played an oil heiress who loses her memory and becomes a cocktail waitress at a truck stop in Broken Hill - not her finest hour as an actress, but her final one after the critics got through with her. "As turgid as an outhouse in reverse thrust," declared the Hill Echo. "Puppy fat Pucci sheds her credibility in the mother of all disaster movies," screamed The Sydney Morning Herald.

"You're in early," a voice said. Bluey looked over at the door. Detective Inspector Jane Venison, a grey-bobbed pastiche of Robyn Nevin and Helen Mirren. She and Bluey were partners more than two decades ago. She had taken the fast path to the top, while Bluey had taken a fast path to Jim and Helga's takeaway shop on the corner. (And a slow, wheezing walk back.)

"But it's a tricky one, this Pucci murder," Bluey said.

"Come on Blue," Venison said. "What's your murder weapon?"

"We're not sure, but ...," Bluey held up the Logie, now sealed in a plastic bag, and tagged
"Exhibit A".

Venison arched an eyebrow. "They've been known to kill a career, but a person? I doubt it," she said. "Got to go, but you know the game, Blue. It comes down to what's right in front of your eyes."

Bluey looked down at the yellowing headlines on his desk and then up at the rogue's gallery, haphazardly taped to the wall. He walked slowly towards the pictures. The pieces of the jigsaw suddenly crystallised in his mind. One by one he looked at them, until his eyes came to rest.

"Well, well, well," he said. "I wonder if you even realise what you've done ..."

Lucy LaBiah from Forensics was, in the flesh, more like an American pathology scene babe than a British one. She had the androgynous athleticism and feral magnetism typically displayed by capable women in tampon commercials.

And like the executive whose corpse lay in a refrigerated filing cabinet next to her dissecting table, she carried a few kilos of silicone inside her Prada-cut lab coat.

Radiating clinical sexuality and the louche self-assurance prevalent among young handbags at awards nights for excellence in mineral water, she looked up from her laptop as Bluey and Scott entered the bluish, neon haze of the basement lab.

A large industrial fan turned slowly behind a wall vent through which an incandescent light shone, creating lazy patterns of light.

On the sink beside Lucy stood a musical greeting card depicting a cartoon Santa carrying a sack, from which chocolates, moulded to resemble capsules of Polonium 210, protruded. Bluey picked it up and a sound chip emitted a tinkling version of the theme from Valley of the Dolls.

"Show me the arrow," he demanded, hoping that when Lucy bent to retrieve it from the specimen trolley he might catch a side view of her porcelain - as it were.

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

"Why would anyone use an arrow or a poisoned dart just to render someone unconscious?" Bluey muttered. "A few flutes of Walkley Award Snowcap Champagne would be a far more subtle approach, surely, especially given Ms Pucci's fondness for anything with bubbles in it."

As if to emphasise his disdain, he took a slug from his hip flask, enjoying the sharp jolt of Glen Bailey & McBride's Industrial Grade pre-malted whisky as it ripped past his nico-stained larynx en route to central.

Lucy produced a plastic specimen bag containing Cupid's lethal dart.

A tiny prick might have rendered Judy unconscious but she was a tough old tart and if her reputation for survival in the ruthlessly cannibalistic world of commercial television was an accurate reflection of her stamina, it would have required very considerable physical effort to force the life from her.

It was obvious to Bluey that poor old Bob Pritchard, with his charts, red crosses and red herrings, was a broken and disillusioned hack. But someone must have noted his pathetic little gallery and seen an opportunity to turn Bob's fantasy world against him.

The bejewelled letter opener, fortuitously retrieved from the lake, was all a bit too Leslie Charteris and daytime suds to be taken seriously. This wasn't Angela Lansbury, it was a blunt object case.

Scott gazed at Lucy's latex-gloved hand and began to imagine unspeakable forensic pleasantries - her naked on a bed of sushi and he suavely interrogating her with the enigmatic banter he'd long admired in US detective shows.

"Imagine what life would be like without hypothetical situations . . ." he heard himself begin but his coital reverie was interrupted by his partner lighting another gasper and motioning him towards the office door of Lucy's boss, the forensic specialist, Dr Otto "Wheelie" Binns, formerly the Dean of Brazilian waxing at the Ponds Institute.

If anyone could make an educated guess as to the nature of the blunt object in question, he was their man.

Bluey's bladder felt like a waterbed but he was beginning to get another feeling - a sense that he was looking too hard to see the obvious.

Too many clues. Too many suspects. Too many Herald writers fiddling with this yarn and waffling on interminably . . .

Was it all becoming a trifle existential? The streets teeming with serial killers playing cat-and-mouse games with profilers and taunting them with enigma at every turn. When you make a fist, four fingers are pointing towards you.

It might be time to loosen up.

Dr Binns was a gifted eccentric who enjoyed a penicillin and bourbon - shaken, not stirred. He favoured dark shirts and lurid neckties - his collar today adorned by a throbbing radioactive confusion his wife, who once worked in the ABC's wardrobe unit, had pilfered from the Media Watch reject bin back in the Stuart Littlemore days.

As the detectives entered Binns slid open a desk drawer to retrieve a half-filled bottle of Lisa Curry Iron Man Kentucky Style bourbon and three unwashed laboratory beakers.

He slipped a cricket protector into his trousers and applied a liberal smear of X-Factor sunscreen to his face before he began speaking.

"Monosyllabic is a word with five syllables" he said cryptically, handing Bluey and Scott a glass of sting. "But I believe we're looking at something with three legs - not the Slovenian tap-dancing cormorant - if you get my drift?"

Bluey's mouth was as dry as tile grout but he barely reacted as the liquid seared his tongue. It wasn't a Resch's but it'd have to do.

This was as odd as a choirboy in a firing squad - an image that immediately crossed his mind, swiftly cross-fading into a police line-up. In slow-motion he began to eliminate the obvious suspects.

Senior detective Bluey Rowe was watching Homer Brown's appearance on Weapons with the Stars. Homer, of course, had been the first star voted off the show - after being revealed as the world's most pathetic archer.

Bluey summoned over his partner. They watched the tape as Homer's arrow slumped, tumbling forward onto Homer's shoes, like a drunk man's spittle. The tabloids had been delighted. "Homer Non-Erectus" read the worst of the headlines.

Bluey prodded at the remote control and they re-watched the moment.

"You're right," said DS Scott Smith, leaning against the wall in his linen suit. "You can see him deliberately shifting his hand so the arrow won't fire."

Bluey sucked on his Winnie Blue. "So why would Homer Brown, three weeks before the murder of Judy Pucci, try to deliberately fool the nation that he's crap at archery?"

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

Bluey took another cigarette and lit it off the one he was still smoking, donkey-root style. Homer, it had to be said, was still their prime suspect. There was the blood on the door of the fridge. And the way he'd charged out of the van when the police had arrived, stark naked and holding a Logie statue.

It had taken a while to round him up, Scott finally tackling him to the ground before shouting for help. Bluey took an amused pull on his cigarette. All that tai chi and all those shots of wheat grass, and the young bloke couldn't even hold down a clapped-out soap star.

It had been Bluey to the rescue, the old cop jogging over, his large arse wobbling like a pair of wombats fighting in a sack. He then employed the traditional Bluey method of arrest. He sat on the suspect.

Now, a few hours on, the case against Homer was building. It looked particularly bad that Homer had reached instantly for the Logie - especially now forensics was describing the murder weapon as "a blunt heavy object".

Yet Judy Pucci had effectively resurrected Homer's career, so why would he want her dead?

Such pesky questions always fired Bluey's temper. He threw the remote control onto the tabletop hitting Scotty's frappuccino. The cup sailed into the air, depositing its contents on Scotty's linen pants.

"Ah, Bluey," Scott Smith wailed, his voice close to hysteria, "it's linen. Italian linen. What were you thinking?" Scott ran from the video room, looking frantically for water. A minute later, he reappeared. "Bluey, quick. You need to see this."

Scott led the way to the van next door. He'd already prised open the lock. Trained in police procedure, Scott would have normally sought a search warrant before he even touched a door, but faced with a permanent stain on Italian linen ... Well, even the most pugnacious civil libertarian would surely admit the extremity of the situation.

Scott quickly led Bluey back into the van. It was dim inside, but still the images jumped off the walls. There was a photo of Judy Pucci with a giant red cross through it, as if marked in blood. And a large map with dotted lines showing where she walked each day. Around this were pasted surveillance photos.

A laptop sat open on the counter. Scott scrolled through the recent internet searches: "poison suppliers, Sydney". "Head injuries, worst place to hit"; "destroy fingerprints". Whoever owned this office had just become suspect No. 1.

There was a creak on the steps and both the officers spun towards the door. A worried face craned around the corner.

"You're the police, right," the man said in a beaten-down monotone. "I think we need to talk." Scott motioned at him. "You better come inside."

He was late 50s, by the look of him, and shambolic. He was wearing old blue corduroys with a torn jumper. The hair was thinning and bedraggled. A stench of whisky came off him in sharp, acrid waves.

He introduced himself as Robert Pritchard, the main writer on Judy Pucci's new show.

Bluey made him sit, then stood over him. "What did you think of Judy Pucci?"

"A butcher," came the answer in the same defeated monotone. "A butcher of scripts. She'd rewrite them, ruin every word. Some days I'd be given the release script and I'd start reading it thinking, 'Oh, this isn't my script. They've given me the wrong one by mistake. An episode written by one of the other writers.' Once, I was 40 pages in before I realised it was my work, just butchered beyond recognition."

Pritchard looked up at Bluey with a pleading look in his eyes. "But I didn't kill her. I know what you'll think, seeing all this. But you've got to understand that writers exist on fantasy. It's
our food."

There was a pause. Pritchard searched out a hip flask and took a swig.

"I've been trying to get a film up. So I don't have to work for the likes of Judy Pucci. I've been working on a revenge plot line. It's about a writer. A little like me. And a TV producer. A little like her. And to make it realistic, I tried to imagine how I would go about doing it.

"It's not as if I knew someone would really kill her."

"So," said Bluey, waving at all the photos and maps. "You're trying to tell us this is just some sort of exercise in creative writing."

Pritchard took another swig. "Well," he said weakly, "writers are always told - you've got to work from what you know. And I know I hate her."

Scotty's mobile went off. It was Lucy from forensics. "We still believe it was a blunt instrument but she was knocked unconscious first. We found a drug."

"A drug," Scotty said. "Administered how?"

The answer seemed to change everything once more. "Via a poisoned arrow," said Lucy, "shot with extreme accuracy and from quite a distance."

Richard Glover took over the Herald's Wednesday TV column from Mike Carlton some time in the mid-'80s. He then took over the Drive show on 702 ABC Sydney, again from Mike Carlton. He took over this murder mystery, following the instalment written by Mike Carlton. Richard hopes he will be happy when he takes over the 2UE breakfast show from Mike Carlton in the year 2017.

Nathan di Maggio inspected himself in the mottled men's room mirror and decided, as usual, that he liked what he saw.

The cream Dolce & Gabbana suit. A Prada shirt, $339. Versace tie in lime green and aubergine. The smoky Gucci sunglasses, worth every cent of the $600 price tag, and today helpfully concealing the black eye that Clint had given him in a late-night lovers' tiff in the steam room at the gym. Brand names. You couldn't go wrong with brand names; the Italian guys who designed that stuff had taste, truckloads of it.

Not that he had actually paid out himself. Pooch bought Nathan di Maggio's clothes for him; socks and underwear, suits, shirts, the lot. Judy Pucci had firm ideas on how she wanted her men to look and the money to get it.

All you had to do in return was throw a leg over the old slag occasionally and trail around after her at industry cocktail parties.

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

Clint hated it, of course. Clint Nguyen was a Vietnamese stud muffin with abs to die for but he could be a jealous little queen when he put his mind to it. "You can't be gay with me and breeding with her," he'd shouted through the steam as he let fly with a stinging slap from his right hand.

But you bloody well could be. This was television and you got what you were prepared to kill for. All right, so Nathan was not exactly on the creative end of the business. But as deputy network sales director at the age of only 27, he was a top gun rainmaker. Jesus, he had flogged that heap of shit Weapons with the Stars to not one but three agency clients, a killer result. And now Pooch wanted him to work the same miracle with Tomorrow Was Mine. Staying cool with Judy Pucci was a no-brainer career move. She could make or break you in television, just like that.

"We think we can offer you synergies to go forward and grow your business," he assured the mirror. Nathan di Maggio could walk the walk and talk the talk. Demographics, cumes, time spent viewing, A-B households, run of schedule add-ons, it was mother's milk, baby. Jesus, if he could flog Tomorrow Was Mine to Nick Scali or Harvey Norman or maybe even McDonald's, chances were Pooch would have the network lease him that Porsche Boxster he craved.

Wouldn't that give Clint the shits, but.

Time for business. Check out the set. Watch them start the shoot.

Schmooze those two bloody idiot actors, Heidi Blum and Homer Brown, get a feel for the show so you could rave about it to the poor bloody unsuspecting advertisers. Easy-peasy. The only bummer would be Clint, who was doing the production make-up and who was still sulking a week after the steam room confrontation.

"Hi Clint."

"Hi Nathan." In a surly tone.

"Still talking to me, stud?"

"I might be."

Clint ostentatiously busied himself in the make-up trailer with the tools of his trade, re-arranging pots of creams and powder, setting out tubes of coloured this and that. "I suppose you're here to brownnose that Pucci bitch," he snapped.

"Something like that."

"Skanky old hag. She can bloody drop dead as far as I'm concerned."

The trailer rocked slightly as a heavy foot landed in the doorway and a large human frame blocked the daylight.

"Who can bloody drop dead?" said a leaden voice. Without waiting for an answer its owner edged into the trailer followed by another even bulkier form.

Scotty South eased himself into the make-up chair, very deliberately allowing his eyes to rove slowly over the two men before him. It was the flinty stare of an experienced homicide detective, designed to intimidate.

Clint, intimidated, fidgeted nervously with a tissue box. Nathan, a salesman and therefore rather less easily intimidated, stared back. The cop was hot. God, he looked like Edward Norton in Fight Club. What in Christ's name was happening here?

"The deceased was found in the lake over at the Sport and Rec camp," said Scotty.

"We have reason to believe that she was murdered by a person or persons," wheezed Bluey.

"Full name Judith Maria Pucci."

Nathan di Maggio felt his entire body turn to ice, the hairs on his neck prickling like barbed wire. Clint Nguyen gave a little strangled scream, then stuffed a tissue into his mouth.

"Coffee, anyone ?" said another voice at the trailer door. It was Chip, the work experience kid, balancing a tray of paper cups.

"You wouldn't believe what's happening in this place," he giggled. "Judy Pucci's been murdered and Homer Brown's wandering around in the nuddy, half smashed, with a bottle of Southern Comfort in his hand."

"Piss off," said detective senior constable Rowe. Chip vanished.

"Now," said detective sergeant South. "I believe one of you gentlemen was in a relationship with Ms Pucci."

"Not me. I'm gay," said Clint. Rather too quickly.

Nathan di Maggio felt, rather than heard, himself speak. His throat tasted like the bottom of a cocky's cage.

"It was me," he croaked.

"Who murdered her?"

"No, no. We had a relationship..."

"Screwing her?"

"Um. Yes."

Bluey stubbed his cigarette into a pot of No. 3 medium olive ultrabase.

"Nice black eye you got under them sunnies," he said. "Want to explain how you got it? Or would your little Asian mate like to tell us who he wanted dead?"

Mike Carlton, broadcaster and newspaper columnist, lost and found a lot of friends writing a TV column for the Herald in the 1980s. He has covered wars, survived TV current affairs - including the ABC's trailblazing This Day Tonight - got in early on news-talk radio and can be heard doing breakfast on 2UE.

Updated Wednesday, December 27: OK, amid all those iPods, DVDs, perfumes and socks, some of you must have found books under the Christmas tree. I didn't - everyone thinks I own every book in the world, which isn't quite true. I would have liked Alice Munro's book of short stories, The View from Castle Rock and The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford. What did you get that you are looking forward to reading (or are already reading)? What will be going straight to charity?

As we crawl through the last days of Christmas shopping, which books are you buying as presents, and for whom (husbands, daughters, lovers, 10-year-old sons, mothers, best friends, neighbours)? Here's my suggestion

for obvious recipients - to aunts from nieces and nephews and vice versa - but also for anyone who loves literature and a bit of trivia. My favourite aunt is getting a copy, though she probably won't have time to read it amid feeding us for Christmas, helping my mother (her sister) to move, holidaying with her daughter (my cousin), writing her PhD thesis, and other auntly activities.

She scored a million points when I was small and she put on a hilarious and endlessly patient one-woman show as the brother-and-sister school kids Thelma and Archie. They dressed up, performed badly in spelling tests, cracked innocent jokes, all in perfect character and accent. What a comedian!

She lost a few points when she promised to take me to the Beatles concert at Sydney's Stadium and didn't get round to buying tickets, then said, "Oh well, next time..." I was desperately jealous when she gave birth to her own daughter. But as adults we're all close friends, she entertains the whole family with her sense of the ridiculous (you should have seen her hopping round the garden at Easter) and she's a support to my mother and an occasional buffer between us.

I, on the other hand, am a flawed half-aunt to my three half-nephews and -nieces. (They are the children of my half-sister.) I turn up at Christmas and birthdays with, I hope, suitably generous and carefully chosen presents. I hear their news from my father and make calls to show my interest in their successes. Occasionally I attend a school concert. But for most of the year I am AWOL - working, travelling, living my grown-up life - and they are busy with school, friends and other kid things. Will they comfort my in my old age? Probably not, but they're wonderful people and I hope we can be friends when we're all older and have more time (huh!).

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

Tiffany Vandenberg, "TV" to her mates, was allegedly 34 and a formidable operator. One thing she always prided herself on was her sixth sense about going over the top.

She'd once read (not something she did a lot of ) that Bob Dylan and Neil Young were considered geniuses because they could sing and play the harmonica and the guitar at the same time. However, strap some cymbals to your knees and you knew you'd gone that little bit too far.

And so it was with Tiffany.

Sure, she'd partnered Kev the plumber, from the hit do-it-yourself program Emoh Ruo, on Dancing with the Stars but she'd done it tastefully without any wardrobe malfunctions - except that unfortunate moment in the samba when Kev's Kleenex tissues had shifted in his trousers which normally fitted tighter than the average prophylactic. Two of the boys on the panel expressed their obvious disappointment and marked him down from an eight to a five.

And, yes, she had been on Medium Star Survivor, in which five couples had tried to last on Pinchgut for a week but as she explained, "Blame the network ... they pressured me into doing it." As for her mum appearing on The Biggest Loser at the same time, well, that had just been a coincidence.

"I can't see why some people don't take me as a serious journalist," she lamented to her boyfriend, Rick, whom she met after he had been expelled from the Big Brother house in controversial circumstances. Rick had allegedly been "pheasant plucking" one of the female inmates - just harmless fun, all housemates had agreed, but the tabloids had gone mad.

"I know I haven't been to Iraq and I was on hols when that bloody tsunami thingie hit ... where was it again, Bali? But I did a great job with Steve Irwin's memorial service. The close-up shot of that little girl kissing the hairy-nosed wombat in the green and yellow scarf was all my idea."

But Tiffany was conscious of her gravitas and had just politely, but firmly, refused an offer for a guest spot on World Championship Wrestling.

Instead, Tiffany had fought for and won an assignment that she felt she could get her teeth into - an in-depth, behind-the-scenes report on the making of Tomorrow was Mine.
She knew, of course, there would be some awkwardness. Overseeing the project was her bete noir ("It's French," she explained to Rick), Judy Pucci. Tiffany called her "Judy Putrid" and the two formidable femmes had come into collision before.

"Where are the bloody visionaries?" Tiffany had moaned to her colleagues some years earlier. Surely Judy Bloody Putrid, the so-called guru of programming, should have been able to see the ratings potential in her reality show idea, Australia's Next Top Aerobics Instructress.

But this day the sun was shining as Tiffany and her camera crew arrived at the Lakeside camp and she was surprised to see how real the crime scene looked. And those two detectives also seemed pretty convincing, especially the older, fat one sucking on the Winnie Blue ... but hang on ... no, it couldn't be ... yes, it was!

Tiffany had met Detective Sergeant Scott South before, while working on police rounds with the The Daily Excess. "Sergeant Scott Spunk would be a better name for him," Tiffany confided in a colleague. It was Scott, in fact, who had helped her line up her Logie-nominated special report for the morning show Cooking with Roger Rogerson.

"What was the quid pro quo for that one?" chortled her old police rounds confidant, Les O'Toole, a seasoned wordsmith of the old school. It was he who'd taught Tiffany phrases like bete noir, among other things.

"What do you mean? No money changed hands!" Tiffany huffed.

"No, quid pro quo. It's Latin for 'something in return'."

"Oh, that," said Tiffany. "I screwed him, if that's what you mean." And now Tiffany once again found herself marvelling at Scott's chiselled features. Straight teeth, crooked smile. Sensitive but tough enough to stir his coffee with his thumb. And all the while she knew that lurking beneath that Ron Bennett suit jacket was a set of abs to die for.

"Yo, wassup bro?" Tiffany asked him sweetly.

"Tell you later," said the young detective, finger held to his lips.

As the crew prowled the corner of the lot for a spot to park a naked man emerged from a trailer. Tiffany couldn't be sure but she thought she recognised him as Homer Brown, once a star on her favourite show, Weapons of the Stars. Her mum had loved him equally years earlier in her favourite show, Suburban Practice, which she had watched religiously for 10 years during which time she had put on 63 kilograms.

The nude man had been carrying something - but what? "Hard to tell from my angle," Tiffany would later tell a court of law, "But, you know, it was something a bit like himself ... a naked man - like the Oscar. Maybe it was a Logie ... I don't know."

The judge had made himself a note: "Logie - or some other blunt object."

Having finally found a parking space, the Newsbeat crew dragooned Chip, the work experience kid on the lot, to give them a hand to unpack the gear. Tiffany was touching up her lippy and checking him out in the rearview mirror when she got the news of Judy Pucci's extraordinary demise.

"Omigod, that's ... that's ..."

"Terrible?" prompted the soundman.

"Yeah, that'll do ... but who ... who would?"

"Who wouldn't?" muttered Chip, as he swung the tripod over his shoulder.

Sure, there were too many crappy horror films, especially remakes. And there were lots of releases - both Hollywood blockbusters and art-house films - that didn't live up to expectations. There were also way too many talking animals in animated movies. But there was still a great deal to enjoy at the movies this year. Everyone will have their own favourites; these are mine.

In terms of films that entertained, touched and prompted conversations about meaningful subjects, here's my Top 10 in rough order of release ...

Brokeback Mountain - I'm still convinced it should have won best picture at the Oscars. You could teach film school students for decades about the craft involved in the direction, acting, scriptwriting, cinematography and music.

Detectives Scott South and Redmond "Bluey" Rowe wade into a murky crime scene on the set of a new TV series in this Summer Herald Whodunnit by past and present Herald television critics.

Each day brings you additional chapters - from Peter Luck, Mike Carlton, Richard Glover, Doug Anderson and Michael Idato - until the final chapter reveals all. Keep your wits about you because readers will be invited to Pick the Perp in a sudden-death competition with book prizes for the correct answer.

Read on, then have a go at telling us what you think happens next. Just keep it as short as possible ...

Here's Chapter 1, by Ruth Ritchie

Judy Pucci's manicured left hand appeared to be waving from under the upturned dinghy.

As the crime scene crew gingerly pulled back the little boat, her hand relaxed. Red talons caught the dawn light. So did the tightly knotted African beads around her neck. Silver discs and sharpened tusks made a collar of stylish but deadly thorns. Always a talking point at parties, in hours those beads would be splashed across the front page of every tabloid in the country.

There was something curiously poignant about the scene. Something Viking, yet not. The abandoned lakeside Sport and Rec camp. The spring sunlight warming a row of faded pastel boats that purely rang with the laughter of long-gone campers. What an unlikely final resting place for Judy Pucci, the hideous hag of prime-time soap. A sorry collection of dental veneers, hair weaves, spray-tanned dermabrasion and natty accessories, all held together in a Juicy Couture jumpsuit, Judy was finally all washed up.

Of course Detective Sergeant Scott South wouldn't grasp the full pathos of this situation until she'd been ID'd. He didn't need her name to know that those comically large silicone breasts saluting the sun were two of the saddest things he'd ever seen.

"Not drowning, waving," Scott observed, thoughtfully and, not for the first time, lyrically.
"She's not doing either. She's bloody-well dead."

Bluey - Senior Detective Redmond Rowe - broke the spell, and a few metres of precious crime scene tape, by tripping as he lit his first Winnie Blue of the day. Scotty's plaster of paris moulds of the footprints by the dinghy collapsed into swampy Play-doh.

"Can you just smoke and swear over there, in the car, by yourself?" Scotty's patience with his tired old partner was already tested. That half hour of tai chi had already worn off. He needed Rescue Remedy and some back-up. He could barely contain himself as Bluey lurched over the body, ashing on her muffin top, one arm elbow-deep in crime scene contamination.

"With pleasure," Bluey replied, "as soon as I rinse off this murder weapon." His tumble on the tape had landed Bluey in the drink and accidental possession of a jewelled letter opener. Excalibur-like, it glittered as Bluey brought it in full sunlight. "Stick that in your little blue DNA torch and smoke it!"

The only thing Bluey hated more than the modern forensically tedious approach to solving crime was his decaf sushi-loving partner's devotion to it. There's nothing Scotty fancied more than a DNA swab and the latex-gloved little vixen who administered it.

"This look like a job for your latex Lacey?" he asked Scotty.

Scotty was already dialling the CSI lab and Lucy, the strangely androgynous object of his desire. "Her name is Lucy, not Lacey and she's not ... mine."

"Lacey, Cagney, Pepper, whatever." Bluey stubbed his butt out in Scotty's Play-doh, delighted to find the remains of yesterday's doughnut in his back pocket.

Meanwhile, on the opposite bank of the lake and a million miles from care, the cast of Tomorrow Was Mine was already in make-up. The catering van was humming with bad coffee and good bacon and egg rolls.

Another day of potentially terrible soap was already under way, the tight-knit (all right, completely disenchanted) community blissfully unaware of Judy's eviction from the biggest reality series of them all.

Homer Brown and Heidi Blum were running lines and spitting chips. The only thing they shared was a loathing for this job, the terrible scripts and the wizened old harridan who had blackmailed them into it.

Blum and Brown, once both and quite separately the darlings of the soap brigade, had fallen on hard times. (Nothing tarnishes faster than an old Logie for Best New Talent.)

Homer Brown had tried everything since A Suburban Practice had folded. He'd barely recovered from the humiliation of being the first archer evicted from Weapons With the Stars. And as for Heidi Blum, there are only so many gossip rag covers you can pull off when your name's only one letter off a supermodel's before those really brainy editors get wise.

Now they were locked into the pilot of a show so bad it would probably run for 20 years, all predicated on their totally fictional relationship and real-life barefoot Balinese wedding, staged by the terrible Judy Pucci.

How they had laughed when she had suggested that Australia needed its own Bennifer, its local TomKat, not believing for a minute that the Australian public would fall in love with HiHo. But they did, and now it's off to work they go, at a godforsaken kiddie camp with a bunch of nobodies and an ironclad contract that would set Judy Pucci up for life.

They were already squabbling when Scotty and Bluey arrived, eavesdropping outside the make-up van with something like forensic legitimacy. Homer was on a roll.

"Did I call you 'plain', Heidi? I meant, 'just plain ugly'."

"I am beautiful, no matter what you say. Words can't bring me down."

"Mine can."

"Don't you bring me down today, Homer."

"Listen, Heidi, I can live with your looks, but the way you speak in Christina Aguilera lyrics is really beginning to grate."

Bluey and Scotty tumbled in and introduced themselves. HiHo were illiterate, but those badges looked real so they went along for the ride. They were worried that their Happy Couple cover had been blown, and then Scotty pulled out the pictures of Judy's corpse.

Was that an exhalation of shock or a squeal of delight? Bluey and Scotty were both cop enough to notice it. What a nervous pair of heart-throbs they were.

Scotty shone his little blue torch in Heidi's ear. Bluey was going to smack it out of his hand, but the torch shone straight out her other ear and onto the bloodstained bar fridge door.

"Miss Blum, may I speak to you outside?"

Heidi didn't have to think about it. She purred at Scotty. "If you wanna be with me, there's a price you gotta pay ..."

Detectives Scott South and Redmond "Bluey" Rowe are partners in crime - solving 'em, that is - but after two years of working together there is still a world of difference between them.
Scott is the younger CSI-Cold Case database-forensic, don't-contaminate-the-crime-scene guy who knows where to get the best coffee and dreams of being able to lash out one day on a swank holiday at Noosa.

Bluey is from the Division 4 and Homicide era - loved the no-nonsense stuff from Gerard Kennedy and Leonard Teale - and has a soft spot for good old soaps such as Waterfront Beat - at least Tony Wood, who played Blocker the publican, knew how to pull a beer. He drinks Reschs and has been known to produce "accidental" DNA samples with a clumsy elbow to the nose.

Unmarried serial-dating Scott likes all new-wave fitness fads, sometimes plays gentlemanly touch football with his old uni mates (but the growing number of wives and young children on the sidelines is causing unexamined angst). He has higher-achieving mates who tell him what the big end of town is up to.

Bluey can name all the Melbourne Cup winners back to Archer, loves the core sports - used to play a bit of grade cricket and junior rugby league. But a corked knee, Packer's Pyjama Game and Murdoch's Blooper League have just about buggered all that. Now he loves to beach fish and to do regular field trips to make sure that another great old watering hole hasn't been knocked down by those developer bastards.

Here's a reader's comment on the previous book club entry with my reply. I'd like to know what you think:

"Just wondering, would it be possible to have concurrent books being discussed on the book club? Eg 3 books per week/fortnight and 3 different blogs so people can participate in the book they feel most affinity with? I really am unsure whether dividing the book by sections of chapters will encourage more people to read it. Due to the difficulty of finding the book in the first place, the interest in Little Big Man has waned a bit judging from the responses on this thread and the 2 other Little Big Man threads; whereas you receive a big initial response to the launch of the book club."

Susan Wyndham replies: I'm so pleased to have your ideas on this and grateful that you've thought about it. I have been thinking along the same lines and wanted to ask for suggestions on how to run this in future. So let me ask people now....

All those people who were excited about the idea of an online book club - where are you? what were you expecting? what do you want? This is for you so I need your input.

Would you like to have several books going at once, so you can choose (or follow more than one)? My concerns about this are 1) this will disperse the interest too much and there will be even less response to each one, and 2) I have so much other reading to do for work that it's hard to keep up with too many extra books. So one condition is that they will be books I want to read.

I agree that the pace I've set is probably too slow once people get reading. I did it this way to try and accommodate people who had the book early and those who would get it later. Imperfect, I know, but this was an experiment and with your continued interest and advice I hope we can streamline the process so it's enjoyable and keeps you involved.

Perhaps I don't need to post such long introductions to each session? And perhaps we should just launch into a more freeform discussion without breaking the book up? Or is it useful to have a structure like this? Please give me your thoughts. Has anyone been involved in an online reading group before? Any tips? What about the Patrick White group?

A few people have named books they would like to read but no one else has backed any of the suggestions. I am keen on Laura's recommendation of Tracks by Robyn Davidson - a 1970s travel memoir about crossing Central Australia by camel and her encounters with the land and people. Unlike Little Big Man it's Australian, it's nonfiction, it's by a woman (but it also touches on themes of race, frontier, physical challenge, etc). I'll be reading this soon anyway and would be happy to share it with others if it's a popular choice. We could concurrently discuss her later book, Desert Places, about living with a nomadic Indian tribe. What's the response?

I want to read We Need to Talk about Kevin, a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver (who will have a new book out in February). It is narrated by an American woman whose son killed his schoolmates in a classroom shooting and explores the dark side of being a parent. It has really moved a lot of readers, been quite controversial and won Britain's Orange Prize for fiction by women.

I am also interested in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, a sweet English novel narrated by an autistic boy that won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award a couple of years ago. It's one of those books we've been discussing on another thread which are published as young adult fiction but attract a wide adult readership. Do I have an unhealthy interest in dysfunctional teenage boys? No, these last two books just happen to have had great reviews and word of mouth.

Then there's a very different book: Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky - a novel written in 1941 but only published two years ago in French and this year in English. It is a semi-autobiographical story set in France as it fell to the Nazis. The reception has been extraordinary and Andrew Riemer, the Herald's chief book reviewer, tells me it is the best book he has read for years.

OK, there are a few ideas. None is compulsory but please tell me what you think. One thing I know is that all these books are readily available.

Every time I think I know where Little Big Man is headed, it changes direction. I wasn't expecting Jack Crabb (Little Big Man since his near-scalping) to toss aside his life with the Cheyenne and become a "white man" again. But that's just what he does under his usual ironic moral code.

He admits early on to having a problem with the Indians' constant fighting among the tribes, which always finishes with some scalps being taken home. His euphemistic attempt to get round the subject ends up being as blunt as his knife, and once again as funny as it is gruesome.

"All right, then: I didn't go out of my way to do it, but I had to take hair now and again. So long as I've confessed that, you also ought to be told

that in such cases the victim ain't always dead or even unconscious, and your knife ain't always sharp and sometimes there is an ugly sound as the scalp parts company with the skull...."

But the pragmatic Jack has his limits.

When the Cheyenne go to war against the white Army for the first time, Jack goes bravely into battle despite his divided loyalties and wearing the plug hat Old Lodge Skins has given him for disguise and protection. When it comes to the crunch, though, he saves his life in a flash by drawing on his rusty English to shout, "God bless George Washington!" and persuade the trooper who wants to kill him that he's a white man.

"Then why in hell are you dressed like that?" asks the soldier, with Jack's knife at his throat. "It's a long story," says the laconic Jack in one of the book's many chapter-ending punchlines.

Berger is good at cliffhanger chapter endings with a philosophical twist. Here are some of my favourites:

*After an ambiguous encounter with a heemanah (transsexual) friend: "Maybe he got the beds mixed up by mistake that night and didn't have anything in mind. Whatever, I personally didn't find him my type."
*After getting rained on while fishing: "That's what white life did to me. First time I got soaked in civilization, I come down with pneumomia."
*Looking up at attacking Indians from under a wagon: "Well, from down that low I couldn't see the butts of anyone's weapons. Which meant they was holding them in a usable position."

So - with his escape from death in battle - begins the white phase of Jack's life. Adopted in Missouri by an inneffectual white preacher and his pretty young wife, he gets to see all the refinement and corruption of town life. It's not a kind (but not altogether black) portrait of white society. He goes to school long enough to learn how to read, falls in love with his "mother" and encounters black, ex-slave servants and their worn-down inability to rebel - a likable if slightly cliched portrayal.

Of course, it can't last. With a polite goodbye letter, he takes off again. Intending to return to the Cheyenne, he admits, "God knows, I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core."

As we've said before, it's this dual identity that gives LBM its voice, tone and meaning. Jack is insider and outsider in both cultures and can present both with the dispassionate clarity of an alien eye mixed with the warmth and detail of familiarity. He teeters constantly between the two, which gives the story its tension.

I like the way history is a mere backdrop to Berger's story, but every now and then a real character or episode intrudes. Trying to be "white" Jack spends a period of poverty and crime in St Louis before returning to the Cheyenne. Knocking on a door in the hope of a handout, he meets a short, bandy man with a sandy moustache who tells him, "Git on out of here, you hairy son of a whore." This is the brief appearance of Kit Carson or, as Jack calls him, Senor Carson.

The Cheyenne take a while to accept him back and he stays just long enough to advise against signing a treaty that would send them onto a reservation and force them to give up hunting for farming. As he explains at the end of Chapter 13, he saves them from the fate of other Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who "touched the pen" and ended up on reservations in Colorado where there was no game, little water and arid soil. A few years later, in 1864, while camped peacefully at Sand Creek, they were massacred by the local volunteer cavalry.

In that unemotional paragraph there's a touch of the grand tragedy behind Berger's story. Have a look at these official reports of the conflict, a fascinating counterpoint to Berger's tale.

(A small aside: Berger comments in the interview linked to my December 10 post on the pleasure he took in naming his Cheyenne characters - Burns Red in the Sun, Shadow that Comes in Sight, Digging Bear, and so on. But the real names in these documents are just as colourful, for example Black Kettle, Knock Knee and One Eye.)

I can't help liking Jack. He is amoral; drinks and whores; steals and cheats for a fast buck; abandons women, friends and jobs; kills and escapes his own death endlessly through luck, cowardice, fast talking and - as a commenter on a past post suggested - cunning. And yet he is no worse, and often better than the criminals, hypocrites and fools around him. He's smart and can be respectful, loving, generous and just when he recognises decency in others. He is a character formed by a new country still forming its own character. Who can blame him for surviving?

How do you feel about Jack? Do you think Berger shows more sympathy for the Cheyenne or the white characters - or do you think he's even-handed? And does he make you like one more than the other?

Next week: Jack marries a Swedish woman and, sort of, settles down.

(I hope more of you have copies of the book now. Let me know. If you have begun reading this week, please comment on this post or the previous posts from December 3 and 10. I expect to finish my posts by the end of December - though you are welcome to keep up the discussion after that. By then I will name our book for January - one that will be easier to get hold of.)

*A recording is awarded platinum status each time it sells 70,000 copies. But not all record companies have supplied ARIA with sales information on all their performers, so the list above is incomplete. It lacks obvious million sellers such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Seekers, and Neil Diamond. To learn more about this problem, click here.
Till we find out for sure, we must rely on estimates like this ...

The all-time most popular musicians with Australian record buyers
Prepared by David Dale for The Sydney Morning Herald, based on each performer's total sales of vinyl and CD albums, using estimates from the Australian Record Industry Association and music researcher David Kent's Australian Chart Book.

THIS IS AN OUT OF DATE REPORT. TO SEE THE UPDATED CHARTS AND JOIN THE LATEST DISCUSSION OF AUSTRALIAN POPULAR CULTURE, GO TO www.smh.com.au/tribalmind.

This contains charts of the most watched programs of the 20th and 21st centuries, prepared by David Dale for The Sydney Morning Herald and last updated October 18, 2006. For a discussion on the latest TV trends, click here.

1. The top shows since 2001
Based on OzTAM's audience estimates for the mainland capitals. Series figures are for the most watched episode of the year.

You can find past Tribal Mind columns at www.smh.com.au/tribalmind and continuing TV analysis at www.smh.com.au/sit. David Dale is the author of 'Who We Are -- A miscellany of the new Australia' (Allen and Unwin.

The Tribal Mind column appears every Tuesday in The Sydney Morning Herald. You can read other columns at www.smh.com.au/tribalmind . David Dale is the author of 'Who We Are' -- a guidebook for the New Australia (Allen and Unwin). To find out which movies in the past 18 months have most satisfied and most disappointed Australians, click here.

For all the gloomy forecasts that children are bored with old-fashioned reading, children's books are among the most popular in public libraries. The Public Lending Right (PLR) annual report for 2005-06 shows The Other Side of Dawn by John Marsden had the highest number of copies in Australian libraries during the past three years,

followed by Mem Fox's Possum Magic, Bryce Courtenay's Brother Fish and Solomon's Song, John Marsden's The Night Is for Hunting and Burning for Revenge and - who'd have guessed? - Flags and Emblems of Australia by Jill B. Bruce.

PLR payments are made to authors ($1.43 a book) and publishers (35.75 cents) according to library holdings of their books as compensation for lost royalties. In 2005-06, payments totalled more than $7 million to 8750 creators and 353 publishers. One author - could it be Courtenay or Marsden, both with nine books in the top 100? - scored between $70,000 and $79,999. All except a handful received more modest amounts between $50 and $5000, no doubt still welcome.

It took Ben Ball almost a year as Penguin's publisher of adults' books to find a literary novel he wanted to buy. "You could spend 30 years looking for something like this," he says. A Fraction of the Whole, a 700-page first novel by Sydney screenwriter Steve Toltz, came to him via a London agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman at Curtis Brown. Though he is "not at liberty to say", word is that Ball paid a six-figure advance in an aggressive auction against four Australian houses.

He describes the novel as "a father- and-son story in a way ... very Australian and fantastically funny. It reminds me of Wes Anderson's films, especially The Royal Tenenbaums, with that modern, ironic, engaging voice. Twenty people in the office have read it and I could tell who was reading it from the laughs emerging from the corridor."

Ball, who was previously editorial director of fiction at Simon & Schuster in London, says he would have bought the book there, too. Penguin will publish in early 2008 simultaneously with Hamish Hamilton in Britain and Spiegel & Grau in the United States.

In (almost) the last Australian book awards of the year, Kate Crawford has won the Manning Clark House 2006 National Cultural Award for Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood. The judges see Crawford, who is also a musician, composer and cultural critic, as "a new voice in Australia's intellectual culture, a woman under 35 who is bridging the gap between the academic world and the general public". Her book "has already made a major contribution to public debate".

A group award went to the creators of The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online, a national co-operative enterprise led by the Australian National University. The online dictionary "is more than an electronic version of its print volumes" and "could not have been provided in any other medium", the judges say.

Manning Clark House is a scholarly and cultural centre based in the Canberra home of the late historian and his family. See www.manningclark.org.au.

It's hard to imagine the Miles Franklin Award suddenly changing its name to the Di Morrissey Award, for example, because of new funding. So it takes a while - about as long as it takes to drink a flat white - to adjust to news that Britain's 35-year-old Whitbread Book Awards are now the Costa Book Awards.

It's not really a change of sponsorship, more a change of branding. Costa is a coffee shop chain owned by the hospitality company Whitbread plc; with lots of bookshop outlets, it wants to promote the cosy association between coffee and books.

Winners in five categories will be named on January 10 (with prizes of 5000 pounds [$12,500] each) and the Book of the Year on February 7 (with an extra 25,000 pounds in prize money). The shortlist for the novel award - which has most often produced the overall winner - is Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, Saving Caravaggio by Neil Griffiths and Restless by William Boyd. See www.costabookawards.com for the rest.

After more than 10 annual print editions, The Australian Writer's Marketplace has gone online with more features: frequently updated contacts, calendars and statistics, a blog and online forums. You can chat with upcoming guests including writers John Birmingham, Markus Zusak and Jodi Picoult, editors, agents and directors of writers' festivals and centres. It won't sell your work or win awards for you (among the stats: each editor sees 5000 manuscripts a year; there's $1.4 million in prize money) but it will guide you through the jungle of possibilities. See www.awmonline.com.au.

It's that time of year again, the time when media organisations stagger to the finish line and say we can't be arsed thinking too much more. We disguise it by saying it's a time of reflection, of retrospection. I'm a fan of tradition, so we'll get reflective but maybe you can do the work.

What have been this year's best moments for you? The best album, the best song, the best gig, the best beginning, the best end, hell, even the best list of best things.

I'll kick it off with a few of my somewhat extended top 10 - which at the moment is more like a top 30 and won't be run in full here - in no particular order and not necessarily better than some of the others on the list but not mentioned here. And then some of the gigs I loved.

Albums:
Augie March's Moo You Bloody Choir
Thom Yorke's The Eraser
The Feeling's Twelve Stops And Home
Skull Snaps' Skull Snaps
The Panda Band's This Vital Chapter
Bob Evans' Suburban Songbook
Holly Throsby's Under The Town
Lambchop's Damaged
The Triffids' Born Sandy Devotional
Sarah Blasko's What The Sea Wants The Sea Will Have
The Drones' Gala Mill
Tunng's Comments Of The Inner Chorus

And on the gig front:
Magic Numbers at the Metro
Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion at the Basement
Beth Orton at the Enmore
Sarah Blasko at the STC
You Am I in several places
Augie March at the Enmore
Ron Sexsmith at the Basement

The Tribal Mind column appears every Tuesday in The Sydney Morning Herald and the TV ratings are updated every weekday at www.smh.com.au/tribalmind . David Dale is the author of 'Who We Are - A miscellany of the new Australia' (Allen and Unwin)

When he was in Sydney for the premiere of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig was unsure whether he was contracted to make two or three more films as James Bond.

Whatever the number is, there's no doubt the producers will hold him to it. The previously little-known Craig has made the best 007 since Sean Connery in his first outing. And after two or three more films, he might even match the great man.

The move to take the series into grittier territory has worked at the box office. Casino Royale opened with a super impressive screen average of $17,100 on the weekend for a total of $6.8 million.

The days of Bond driving an invisible car, surfing giant waves, snowboarding down avalanches and going from bedraggled torture victim to male model after a quick shave seem like distant memories.

Here's what I particularly like about the new Bond ...

* Craig looks like a man who has gone a few rounds. As well as being fit and athletic, he has a likably lived-in face. I'm prepared to forgive him for running in that pistons-for-arms way like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III.

* Craig is a strong enough actor to convince as the killer that is Bond. Brosnan had that steel to a degree, especially in Die Another Day. So did Dalton but without the warmth and glimmers of wit that are a feature of Casino Royale.

* The relationship with the Bond girls is more intelligent and sophisticated. Like many a contemporary, 007 even puts work before sex in the champagne-for-one scene.

* He can lose battles on the way to winning the war - the torture scene, the first round at the card table and trying to use the contents of the glovebox to keep his heart beating. That task - how's this for symbolism? - falls to Vesper.

What did you like about the new James Bond in Casino Royale? Were there things you didn't like? How do you think Daniel Craig compares with past 007s?

Stop the presses! Random House Australia tells me copies of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger are in the warehouse today and will be in bookshops before the end of the week. Some shops - I know about Gleebooks at Glebe and Better Read Than Dead at Newtown - have ordered stock. But any bookshop can get a copy in for you. Just remember to ask for the Random House US edition, with the ISBN 978-0-3852-9829-2 and at the very good price of $29.95.

Thanks for your patience - and please join in the discussion of this wonderful novel. If you start reading soon, you will easily catch up. Feel free to go back and add comments to my Book Club entries on December 3 and December 10. This is a fluid conversation and I look forward to hearing from you. I also recommend the book as a Christmas present - with the bonus of a built-in discussion group!

Satire, postmodernism, revisionist history, or something else? My responses to the first few chapters of Little Big Man are complex and disconcerting.

How can I laugh at a scene where a crowd of white men travelling through Cheyenne country give the Indians jugs of whiskey and watch while they become crazily, fall-down drunk then - along with many of the Indians themselves - become victims of their random violence?

But for all its horror, the scene has a quality of slapstick humour. There are so many unwitting cultural misunderstandings going on here that you at least have to smile as you cringe.

Ten-year-old Jack Crabb's journey from Indiana across the American West begins because his preacher father wants to reach Utah and convert to Mormonism. He likes the religion's principle of polygamy, although he says he doesn't want more than one wife for himself. So the family links up with some late losers headed for the California goldfields.

It doesn't take long for them to encounter Indians, Pawnee and later Cheyenne. Berger makes some evocative if not original observations of the Indians, from their ability to appear silently over a hill to their lack of a word for "thank you" because they consume any gifts of food with a constant, courteous "how, how", which means "good, good".

The usual handout to Indians who approach travellers is coffee but coffee beans are in short supply, hence the stupid decision to give whiskey instead. The whole novel follows from this misstep. It is a small foretaste of the mid-18th-century Indian Wars in which thousands would die and the Cheyenne would be herded onto reservations.

The drunken massacre, which kills Jack's Pa, is followed by rape until Jack's sister Caroline steps in. A brave, brawny, androgynous figure, she ends the strife and - in another miscommunication - offers Jack and herself as hostages in exchange for the safety of the group. Jack puts another twist on her motives when he says, "she was humiliated at not having been raped".

As it turns out, Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne she thought had desires on her, had mistaken her for a man. The horses she thought were to carry her and her brother away were being offered to pay for the dead men. When she realises she is not going to become "an Indin princess in feathers and beads", and has choked on a peace pipe, watched a dog killed for food, and been felt up by the whole curious group, Caroline skedaddles, leaving Jack to settle into tribal life.

One of the first things he has to do is gnaw a piece of fresh, bloody heart from a slaughtered antelope. Ghastly though it sounds, he relates the experience calmly and describes the flavour poetically as "live and fleet".

He is unromantic in his observation of the camp. "...the smell alone is very queer: it isn't precisely a stench as white people know one, but a number of stinks melding together into a sort of invisible fog..."

He portrays the Cheyenne as very human, courageous, likable and flawed. His comments continue to mix admiration with plain-talking, which sometimes comes out as racist insult. He doesn't see it like that, of course. For example, "It always seemed marvelous to me that savages was not inconsiderate except through ignorance." The people he is used to dealing with, one can infer, are inconsiderate for all kinds of deliberate reasons.

The Cheyenne have their own arrogance: their term for themselves translates as "Human Beings", implying everyone else - white men and other Indian tribes - are something else, lesser and alien.

There's a clever passage in Chapter 5 in which Old Lodge Skins tells Jack about his grandfather's grandfather's first sighting of white men. He thought the tracks of their shoes were made by a strange animal with toes joined for swimming, their clothes fur or skin, and perhaps they were a type of grizzly bear. When they lifted their shotguns, he saw them as long penises.

Another Indian of the Minneconjou people protrays the whites ironically as poor, homeless people to whom the Indians gave food until they appeared in large numbers. They brought cattle that were inedibly tough because they had lost their testicles. They carried wagons full of useless things, and the soldiers shared women "whom one must give a present every time he lies with her". What an odd, illogical people we are!

By Chapter 6, Jack has learned to ride without being tied onto his horse, has experienced the magic of an antelope shoot or "surround", has almost lost his scalp in one of the frequent expeditions to steal horses from another tribe, and has earned his new name, Little Big Man.

Berger gives us a great deal of fascinating detail about Cheyenne life through Jack's clear-eyed, if culturally distorted, perceptions. In a comment on the previous book club entry, Utegrrrl wondered how much research Berger did to create this vivid picture.

In answer, I found this excellent interview with Berger, in which he says he didn't visit the Cheyenne for research but read enormous amounts about them. (I wonder if any of his sources could accuse him of plagiarism?! See my earlier entry on accusations against Ian McEwan.) He mentions some surprising sources and influences, including George Orwell.

So I'm reading the novel on several levels. It's a rollicking good yarn, told by a narrator with no inhibitions and a dry wit. It is a reminder of how our views of indigenous people, or at least the way we speak about them publicly, have changed since the mid-1800s. And it is an entertaining lesson - while never forgetting it is fiction - in history and a culture that I know little about.

Although Berger writes with a knowingness that Jack is unacceptably racist, he also uses him a as a means to say things he couldn't say as an omniscient narrator. I don't think Berger is racist - and I'm not suggesting he should have done a thing differently - but I wonder how this book would go down if it was newly published now. I wonder if he would write it differently now. It stands as a marker of a time, the 1960s, when attitudes, like Jack's life, teetered on an edge between difference and understanding. For all those reasons I find it very provocative and stimulating.

I can't end without saying that the book is also beautifully written. Berger's fine turn of phrase easily combines the roughness of Jack's voice with a writer's elegance. If you agree with me, I'd love to hear which sentences particularly impress you.

A conversation over lunch in 2003 alerted the writer Nick Jose and literary agent Mary Cunnane to the need for an anthology of Australian literature. Jose, then president of Sydney PEN, recommended Marjorie Barnard's novels to Cunnane, his vice-president, and they discussed other writers whose work was shamefully out of print, such as Christina Stead and Olga Masters. "Where's the Norton?" asked Cunnane, who was formerly an editor with W. W. Norton in New York.

Since the 1960s, Norton has produced chronological anthologies of English literature, American literature, poetry, African-American, women's and world literature.

Jose and Cunnane decided to produce a similar collection of Australian writing. After a disheartening false start, their partnership of Macquarie University and Allen & Unwin, plus Sydney, Adelaide and Deakin universities, recently received an Australian Research Council linkage grant of $241,000. The total budget is $1.75 million including $350,000 for world copyright fees - of which the Myer Foundation this week promised $50,000. The remainder is still to be raised.

More progress on Monday as David Malouf launches the Centre for the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in Macquarie University's Division of Humanities, where the dean, Christina Slade, is the project's "white knight". Work has begun by contributing editors Elizabeth Webby (18th century to 1900), Nicole Moore (1900-1950), Kerryn Goldsworthy (fiction, drama, film 1950-2005), David McCooey (poetry and nonfiction 1950-2005) and Anita Heiss and Peter Minter (indigenous literature).

The anthology will appear in 2009 with 1500 pages and 600,000 words, including all forms from novel extracts to letters, speeches and diaries, with introductions, short biographies and suggested reading. A separate indigenous volume will precede it in 2008 because "there's a lot of interest in Aboriginal culture outside Australia", says Jose, the books' general editor. He hopes they will find a place in schools, universities, homes, and that "this will be the Lonely Planet of literature and appeal to the newcomer and the visitor".

As advisory publishing editor, Cunnane is responsible for overseas sales. If the books succeed, there will be a new edition in three to five years and - let's dream - reader interest will push publishers to bring lost books back into print. MUP is starting next year with new editions of several novels by Christina Stead.

The age of blockbuster books requires publishers to plan for lean times, too. Scholastic Corp in the US, for example, saw its revenues from children's books fall 59 per cent to $US112.6 million ($150 million) in the first quarter of this financial year compared with $US275.3 million in the same period last year. This is due in part to "Harry Potter Trade revenues" of only $US5 million, down from $US18 million following release of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK also reported "a collapse" in its annual profits that was partly due to Potter's absence. Instead of the forecast profit of 20 million-plus pounds for 2006, Bloomsbury announced on December 12 that it had made closer to 5 millon pounds. This year the company spent more than 31 million pounds made from Potter books on rights to other new books. Many are still to be published and revenues from others have been disappointing.

Analysts wonder how these companies will adapt after the seventh and final Potter volume.

The Scottish publisher Canongate had a decline in pre-tax profits to 118,000 pounds ($295,000) in 2005 from 490,000 pounds in 2004 and more than 1 million pounds in 2003. The reason? Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which won the 2002 Booker Prize, finally began to drop off bestseller lists after total British sales of almost 2 million copies. "Life without Pi is something we have been preparing for," says a directors' report. Perhaps Kate Grenville's The Secret River and M. J. Hyland's Carry Me Down - both shortlisted for this year's Man Booker - will boost Canongate's coffers.

English journalist Richard Shears has published "one of the fastest books in Australian publishing history," according to his agent, Tim Curnow. Wildlife Warrior: Steve Irwin 1962-2006, A Man Who Changed The World (New Holland Publishers) came out in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Britain and the US at the beginning of November after Shears wrote its 75,000 words in six days (with research help from his wife, Isobelle Gidley). Irwin died on September 4. Australian sales have passed 20,000 and rights have been sold in the Czech Republic with other sales expected.

Speed doesn't necessarily mean quality. But there's a market for instant, news-related books and Shears, the Australian-Pacific correspondent for London's Daily Mail, should have a Guinness record in producing them. He published the first Commonwealth book on the Rainbow Warrior, and the first books about Azaria Chamberlain, the backpacker murders and Peter Falconio's murder.

Julianne Schultz, the editor of Griffith Review - known for essays more than fiction - is proud that nine of the 44 stories in Black Inc.'s The Best Australian Stories 2006, edited by Robert Drewe, were originally published in her journal. Five were in the issue The Next Big Thing, which was a great opportunity for new writers such as Patrick Holland, Will Elliott and Daniel Wynne. Drewe chose 30 stories from Australian and overseas journals - such as HEAT, Meanjin, Overland, The Monthly and The New Yorker - still vital to our culture.

As that towering musical figure Kamahl once put it, why are people so unkind? This week's round of post-game analysis of the ABC's favourite albums poll brought home again how vicious the dialogue about music is. And how dispiriting that is.

I want people to care deeply about music. Not just because it's my job and if nobody gave a stuff there'd be no need for what I do, but because it's my passion and because I reckon music, like books or art or sport, enriches your life.

So loving the music which moves you is a good thing, as is arguing passionately about why you consider some music fails - on taste, on quality, on good sense, on sound or skill - to meet your standards. If you didn't care about things which were bad you wouldn't really care about things which are good.

But what's struck me for some time is how this being passionate about your music so easily slides into being vicious and childish about someone else's preferences. I don't mean saying Bat Out Of Hell stinks, but saying Bat Out Of Hell is three loads of crap and if you like it you're a cretin of the first order, an embarrassment to yourself and clearly not worth the space, so go away and shut up.

The favourite albums list of course got more attention than it deserves, than any such list deserves. Earnest pontifications about what this says about Australians, about ABC viewers/listeners, about the appalling absence of (insert album name of your choice here) from the list and the even more appalling presence of (insert album name of your choice here). You know the drill. All done as if it means anything, as if it represents anything.

It's just a list, firstly. It's just a list of favourites from people who can be bothered voting. It's just a list of favourites from people who can be bothered voting who have an opinion, which is worth no more but no less than anyone else's. You don't have to respect their opinion but you don't have to care either.

It was hardly surprising in most cases - gee, the biggest selling albums of the past few decades turned out to be the favourites of most people! - and did not mean you had to like, dislike or buy any of the nominees. It existed because someone created it, not because anyone needed it.

Yet you could watch the fur fly afterwards and, in typical fashion, the nasty, the brutish and the excessive used the occasion to launch into their favourite whipping boys: the ABC, the commercials, the pretentious, the suburban, the mild-mannered middle-of-the-roader, the ardent alternative fan, the thick boys, the prim girls, those "others" who don't think like you.

As a friend pointed out today, this is hardly new: it's almost a perfect description of school. "It was almost a 'cool' contest at high school for the music snobs (I should know, I was a major offender). Very adolescent," she said. I know what she means, I did it too. I, you, we were total wankers at times, no doubt. Very adolescent.

But what about when the practitioners of this kind of petty behaviour aren't adolescents anymore? What about when the abuse has little sense but plenty of long-developed, adult-strength bile?

There is no better space to see this than online, on blogs like these. (On any topic, from sport to politics really, but we'll use music for this example.) The freedom to say and have heard what you're thinking immediately is intoxicating. The self control, the respect, is far less exciting. You want to see your fellow humans at their vilest, read blog postings about other blog posters. You like Wolfmother? Pillock! You're an Oasis fan? Tosspot. You don't like Something With Numbers? Old fart. Why don't you hip-hop fans choke yourselves on your bling? You people buying pop records have brains in your left buttock. Etc etc.
Jeez, grow up folks. Play nice with the other kids in the playground won't you?

Closed: Thanks for all your questions. We have now closed off the blog.

Later this week the Herald will be talking to Ben Harper, who headlines next year's East Coast Blues & Roots Festival. We want those who love him most - and maybe even a few who don't - to ask the questions. We'll then hit him with the most interesting ones (or, at least, the ones we hope will get the most interesting answers) and the results will be published in the Herald and on smh.com.au in the coming weeks. So get thinking and get in touch.

Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes beat Kenny to the best film AFI Award last night, also beating out Candy and Jindabyne. Ten Canoes was a worthy film, the first feature made in an Aboriginal language, but was it a good film? Kenny was a hilarious romp about a dunny carter that cleaned up at the box office from word of mouth. Did Kenny miss out? Does the decision stink? Or should Candy or Jindabyne have won?

Somewhere between five and 10 per cent of wines suffer from some sort of spoilage, usually cork taint. How many affected wines are we drinking without realising it?

Last weekend in Melbourne I tried a Yarra Valley pinot noir at one of the terrific gastropubs. The wine was glorious, tasting of dirt, rhubarb and cherry with smooth tannins, and a superb match with food. I was so enamoured that when I saw it at a bottle shop the following night, I picked it up for another go. It could have been a completely different wine. Flat and featureless, it had no obvious smell or flavour of cork taint, yet something was amiss.

Had this been the first time I tried the wine, I would have assumed it was a dud. How many times does this happen? How many good wines have been written off after a disappointing experience due to some sort of fault or spoilage?

In this case the wine wasn't obviously corked. By "corked" I don't mean there were floating bits of cork in the glass; I'm talking about cork taint, when mould gets into a cork's pores and reacts with the wine. In most cases a corked wine should be immediately obvious: it will have a mouldy smell like a wet hessian sack and will usually overwhelm all other aromas from the wine.

But if the smell is more like old books or a dank, wet cellar it is often confused with "ageing", particularly if you're a bibliophile and love the smell of musty libraries. In its milder form, cork taint will just render the wine "flat" tasting. Even if it mainly affects the smell, this is devastating; aroma contributes around 75 per cent to a wine's taste. Because it isn't obviously a tainted wine you are left thinking the wine was pretty bland, and, unfortunately, you'll probably vow to never buy it again.

Not all wine faults are the result of cork. Other factors can affect the sensitive, ever-changing beverage such as oxidation, which occurs when a wine is spoiled due to exposure to air. Sometimes this is heralded with the aroma of beer-soaked carpet; sometimes it just results in a flat smell and taste as the wine loses its fresh, fruity characters. Not exactly the stuff which dreams are made of.

A little oxygen is actually a good thing for wine: it is essential during winemaking and of course assists a wine during the breathing process which transpires after removing the cork on an older bottle. A little bit of air leaking into the bottle enhances the ageing process, and natural cork allows this. But when too much oxygen somehow gets into a bottle through an imperfect seal it reacts unfavourably with the wine. Think of an exposed slice of apple when left out on the bench - the fruit browns and begins to sour.

There are various other faults which can be transmitted in the winemaking process from winery equipment, oak barrels, sterilisers and even reactions with yeasts, but cork taint and oxidation account for most tainted wines.

How do you know if your wine is affected?

It's not always easy to identify unless you have an identical bottle opened to compare it to. And unfortunately there's no way of detecting spoilage from a bottle's appearance - you have to rely on its smell and taste. But how many examples slip through the radar? Particularly when the taint may not be accompanied by a strong smell, or when your tastebuds are affected by the drink?

If you're able to identify a tainted bottle, airing the wine won't help. In a restaurant or bar you shouldn't have to pay for the wine, and if you've bought it from a bottle shop you should be able to return it. You could buy wines in screw cap enclosures as a preventative measure; they're becoming the norm for Australian wines as more makers realise they keep the flavours fresh, and more drinkers become educated that they aren't a sign of cheap and nasty plonk. (What drinkers will make of crown seal closures, which have just begun to appear on some Australian wines, is another matter.)

Despite the risks of spoilage though, some winemakers are sticking to cork closures. The long-term effects of how the wine will evolve in the bottle (or not) under a screw cap haven't been rigorously tested yet. Many high-end winemakers are still comfortable using premium grade cork which is more reliable and less likely to develop taint. There's also the romantic appeal of tradition associated with cork, and, rightly or wrongly, it's still considered a nice point of difference between new world or mass market interlopers and old world or prestige producers.

When so much time and painstaking effort goes into crafting a wine, it's nothing short of a disaster that so many drinkers are unknowingly consuming a wine which isn't at its best.

If it's true that up to one in 10 wines is spoilt (or simply lost its exuberance), I must be drinking plenty of affected wines without realising it. How about you?

The accusation of plagiarism against British novelist Ian McEwan is serious enough to have brought out the reclusive American novelist Thomas Pynchon in his defence. Pynchon joins an international line-up of supportive authors recruited yesterday by McEwan's publisher at Jonathan Cape, including Australia's Thomas Keneally, John Updike, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood.

"I think it's a well accustomed process for a writer to be able to take something from the public record and even borrow events from another person's book - nonfiction, of course - as long as it is acknowledged and they turn it into their own work, with that added creative value," Keneally told Undercover today.

Pynchon, whose novel Against the Day is published this week, went further in his letter to his agent, saying McEwan "merits not our scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's book in his novel Atonement.

The murky issue was raised two weeks ago

when Vanessa Holt, the agent for the late Lucilla Andrews, claimed that Andrews had been about to complain about McEwan's "copying" of scenes from her book No Time for Romance, a memoir of her work as a nurse during World War II. But she died before she could make her case public.

McEwan responded with a detailed - and I think convincing - explanation of his use of details from Andrews's book.

Although I haven't read Andrews's words against his, he has clearly acknowledged her work as an inspiration and a direct source - both in the book and in talks and interviews. If anything, he has brought to wide attention an out-of-print book that had probably slipped into obscurity.

"We're all working from what's on the public record," says Keneally, who learnt the importance of acknowledgement after an accusation against his 1976 novel Season in Purgatory. He is now so careful that his 2007 novel, The Widow and Her Hero, will at his request list its sources upfront rather than at the back of the book. After publication three years ago of Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel, the author of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden, wrote thanking him for an acknowledgement of his carefully researched book.

"If we're not allowed to take from the public record and make something of our own out of it, history would be impossible" says Keneally. "War and Peace would have been impossible. Shakespeare would have been in trouble for stealing from Petrarch and other sources...We all plunder books that we like but there are certain legalities. Copyright is not violated by proper use."

Clearly there is a difference between talented creative writers' "borrowing" details from other, acknowledged sources and the wholesale stealing of slabs of information that increasingly goes on among students who Google, cut and paste their essays. And, of course, there are authors who plagiarise: Helen (Darville) Demidenko was found to have lifted passages from several authors for her controversial novel The Hand that Signed the Paper.

Murray Bail appeared to have taken some words from an old textbook, Eucalypts, for his novel Eucalyptus. He could easily have avoided the complaint with an acknowledgement, because the rest of his novel is so brilliantly original and the "borrowed" descriptions of trees so perfect in their context.

Clumsily repeating exact words is different, too, from taking a detail of description from elsewhere. As Keneally argued to me, why would a writer with talent and reputation deliberately plagiarise?

"McEwan doesn't need to steal other people's words to have words, because he is a very creative writer." But Keneally says writers are drawn to the salient detail that only a witness to events can bring to a story - ""little stuff that is unimportant to history but like lightning strike, poetic and true".

As well as legality, acknowledgement seems to me a question of professional courtesy. Even when there is not a strict question of copyright infringement, any writer or journalist who draws on another's work - and we do it all the time - should credit the source.

"The whole point of crediting someone is that their work is meant to gain lustre rather than be diminished," says Keneally.

And yet, it is possible to go too far. Norman Mailer's new novel about Hitler's childhood, The Castle in the Forest, coming out next month, lists 126 authors and books that "enriched" his work. He's not alone, according to thisNew York Times story. As well as the copyright issue, this seems to signal an author's desire to be taken seriously: I did my research, I got my facts right. Perhaps it's an attempt to appeal to the hordes of readers who are deserting fiction for nonfiction.

Technicalities aside, I tend to agree with The New Republic's literary critic, James Woods, who tells The New York Times, “I like the idea that the story itself is autonomous and self-sufficient. But I’m terribly old fashioned. I wish they would reinstate ‘The End'.”

When it comes to a quality field at the Australian Film Institute Awards, the high water mark recently was when Lantana was up against Moulin Rouge, The Dish and the Bank in 2001. The low point was when Somersault was the only strong film, winning everything, in 2004.

On Thursday night the leading contenders are Kenny, Ten Canoes, Jindabyne, Candy and Suburban Mayhem at the main awards (after Wednesday night's industry prizes). When you consider that other nominated films this year include Last Train to Freo, 2.37, Macbeth, The Book of Revelation, Caterpillar Wish and Kokoda, it's a solid range of very different films.

So how will it go? Tell us who deserves to win in the main categories ...

The release of Freddy Kruger's fourth film, Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master, was a big occasion in Dubbo. Well, at least it was a big deal for Videohead. Actually, if truth be told if was a bigger deal for Videohead's older brother and sister who were old enough to gain admission to the cinema.

Still, the promise of fresh ghastly death scenes was simply irresistible and thankfully, Videohead's older brother was kind enough to rent the video while babysitting his eternally grateful younger sibling.

Freddy Kruger was a cunning creation from an inventive filmmaker, Wes Craven, that offered an intelligent angle on the slasher genre. But even a villain as diabolical as Kruger becomes diabolically boring after the umpteenth retread. There are eight Nightmare on Elm Street films (if you count Freddy vs Jason, an Elm Street/Friday the 13th spin-off) of varying quality from the abysmal Freddy's Revenge to the intriguing New Nightmare. Since New Nightmare followed the Final Nightmare we can decipher that the seventh sequel's title was a touch misleading.

Kruger isn't the lone ranger in the bulging franchise stakes. Many other horror titles have stretched their core gimmick to the enth degree and in most cases each sequel was progressively worse. Friday the 13th, a cracker of a movie, was then followed by twelve sequels even after the fourth film was deceptively titled The Final Chapter. The Halloween series, featuring the iconic psycho Michael Myers, dragged out for a total of nine films having inflicted every conceivable wound on the seemingly indestructible killer.

Franchises are not the sole domain of the horror genre, though. As last week's Videohead discussed, studios are willing to add to a series repeatedly even if it means that the star requires a full-time nursing staff and colostomy bag. And now there is news that the current King of Hollywood and pin-up boy of the liberal screen intelligentsia, George Clooney, has vowed to move ahead with another Ocean's Eleven flick with his production partner and indy-directing idol Steven Soderbergh.

Clooney says that the decision is based on the belief that they did not want the series to end with the abysmal Oceans Twelve (OK, he didn't say abysmal but let's call a spade a spade). And why question the motives of a man who is fighting for starving Africans and a renaissance in politically minded American filmmaking? Surely, Oceans Thirteen is all about ending the series on a high note and has nothing to do with studio pressure or the lure of box office bullion.

Will this be the final Ocean's film? Will Ben Affleck or Danny De Vito be the thirteenth gang heist member? Will they dare to make a fourth instalment called Oceans Fourteen: The Final Chapter? Will one of characters at least pay homage to the myriad slasher franchises and take a blade to Julia Roberts's character?

Hmmm. It's anyone's guess. What we can rest easy about are the plot basics: someone's going to get robbed and Brad Pitt will wear designer clothes and a slimy smug smirk throughout. So Mr Clooney, if you're reading (stop laughing people), Videohead has got a wee challenge for you. Don't stop at three Ocean's movies, go the whole hog. Make ten, nay, eleven or twelve of them. Short of ideas? Make Danny Ocean a UN representative and drop him into Darfur or have him steal files from a Republican candidate that could bring down a Neo-Conservative US Government. Failing that, put a machete in his hands and direct him to the closest teenage summer camp.

A poll of 100,000 Australians has revealed our favourite albums of all time, with no local artists in the top ten. Don't you wish you had voted now? What do you think of the final count, and which albums should have made the cut?

Why haven't I read Thomas Berger's Little Big Man before? It's a masterpiece! I remember once half-watching the 1970 movie starring Dustin Hoffman, but I stupidly dismissed it as a Hollywood western of the John Wayne kind, which I usually find wooden and shallow. I must take another look but, for now, the book is enthralling.

I'm posting this first discussion of Little Big Man for those of you who, like me, have started reading and are impatient to have your say and hear what others think. But I know many people have had difficulty in finding a copy. I'm sorry I made my impetuous first choice - based on Nancy Pearl's recommendation - without checking availability more thoroughly. But I still think it's a brilliant book for us to share. Random House is bringing copies in from the US and I'll let you know when they are going arrive. In the meantime, I hope this taste will whet your appetite. We'll go very slowly so late starters can catch up.

Berger, who is now 82, worked as a journalist and librarian and is the author of more than 20 books including the 1999 sequel The Return of Little Big Man. In a New York Times review of his 1996 novel Suspects, Joe Queenan wrote, "Thomas Berger is the master of the plausibly insane novel."

But Berger is really known for one book - this one, published in 1965.

The story is vividly told in the first-person by 111-year-old Jack Crabb. He is a white man who was brought up by Cheyenne Indians from the age of 10 and became known as "Little Big Man" (you can see why Dustin Hoffman was well cast). Living with the Indians (as the book refers to them - "Native Americans" came later) he has four wives, eats dog meat, wears animal skins and encounters figures from American history such as Wyatt Earp and General Custer. We'll go into more detail about the plot as we progress through the book.

Among my first impressions are that Little Big Man reminds me of Peter Carey's 1985 novel Illywhacker, which is narrated by the 139-year-old Herbert Badgery. Both men are brilliant storytellers and have lived through the great events of their country's history but may also be terrible liars or at least unreliable narrators because of their prejudices and faulty memories. There is also a possible resemblance to the new novel Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier (author of Cold Mountain). Thirteen Moons is about a white lawyer adopted by a Cherokee elder, but Frazier's book sounds far more solemn and somewhat tedious. If you've read those books, do you see any likenesses?

Crabb's story is framed by a Foreword and Epilogue in the words of Ralph Fielding Snell, a fictional character who finds Crabb as an ancient and, yes, crabby resident of a senior citizens' home and tapes his account of his life.

Let's start by looking at Snell's Foreword. This was all it took to convince me I was going to love this book. It is immediately funny and ironic, so I knew the book was not going to be an earnest, boys' own adventure story (though there are elements of that). Berger's creation of his characters is exquisitely detailed and suggestive.

Snell is a pedantic, physically delicate "man of letters" in his words or "sissy" as Crabb calls him. He is at home in 1952 following "an operation to correct a deviated right septum of the nose" and being cared for by Mrs Winifred Burr, a nurse he describes as "stout, over-curious, and spiteful".

Mrs Burr mentions an old man who claimed to be 104 years old at an old-folks' home where she used to work: "...nasty old customer, scrawny as a bird and with skin like a wornout oilcloth, he couldna been less than ninety even if the other was a dirty lie".

Snell is a collector of Indian relics and sets out to find this old man, if he exists. Indeed, he does, in the psychiatric section of the Marville Center for Senior Citizens in an otherwise unidentified part of the American west. He finds a small, withered, foul-mouthed figure with a voice like "the plucking of a guitar the belly of which is filled with cinders". I picture him as something like Grandpa in The Simpsons.

Well, I love everything about this 14-page introduction. Almost like a short story in itself, it makes me want to know more about Snell than I ever will and it sets up Crabb as a fabulously uncouth human relic of American history.

There are hints that Berger will present his own views on history and the way it has been told. How could he not? For example, to Snell's horror, Mrs Burr tries on a valuable Indian headpiece from his collection and does a crude war dance in the doorway to his bedroom. Apart from his fear that she will destroy it, he notes, "what Mrs Burr was actually doing, albeit unwittingly, was to dramatize the malaise of our white culture". Is this the difference between the scholar's overly delicate, analytical approach to indigenous cultures and the completely ignorant, unrefined general attitude?

Berger was writing at a time when the civil rights movement was beginning to stir Americans' awareness of the mistreatment of black and Indian Americans. By presenting a white man caught between two cultures he highlights the gulf. But he does not seem to fall into sentimental stereotypes of either the old Noble Savage or the more recent politically correct version either. We shall see....

I laughed aloud at the minutiae of Berger's writing. Snell tells us that the hated Mrs Burr died later in "an unfortunate accident" when her Plymouth hit a beer truck. What an undignified and - for Crabb - satisfying end. Snell describes Crabb's laugh as sounding like "the grating of a carrot". At the old peoples' home, he has a sneezing fit brought on by the potted geraniums, which causes his septum to ache. This he takes as a lesson that each of us faces daily situations in which we can choose to act heroically or cravenly. How ludicrous when compared with the battles and murders to come! But how human, too.

Berger cleverly allows Snell to explain how he has presented Crabb's speech - with slight editing for sense and propriety - so that he can then write the rest of the novel in idiosyncratic but digestible English.

What do you think of this Foreword? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? What does it lead you to expect of the main story? How did you respond to the characters of Snell, Crabb and Mrs Burr? Do you think Berger's writing has aged well?

Please post your comments on these and any other points. They don't have to be orderly and if they're brief all the better. Just toss them in. Let me know if and how you got hold of the book. If you still need a copy, please order one from your bookshop now so they will get it in quickly for you. Ask for the Random House US paperback edition - the ISBN is 978-0-3852-9829-2 and the price is $29.95.

Don't forget Nancy Pearl will be in Sydney on Sunday and Monday, December 10 and 11, if you want to ask her why she chose this book for us - or talk books in general with her. See my November 17 post "A string of pearls" for event details.

In another week or so I will begin discussion of the first few chapters.

Chapter 1, "A Terrible Mistake", opens like this:

"I am a white man and never forget it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.
"My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn't have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of a Sunday morning for services..."

A first novel has won Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Iain Hollingshead's novel Twenty Something beat Tim Willocks's The Religion by a nose for its line about "bulging trousers".

The 14-year-old award was started by Auberon Waugh, late editor of The Literary Review, to help stamp out redundant sex scenes in fiction. It doesn't seem to be having much effect but the results of the competition are always entertaining if sometimes unrecognisable as descriptions of sex. At least we've moved beyond trains rushing into tunnels.

Here, if you are grown-up and can be bothered with more, are extracts from the shortlisted books, some of them very respectable works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, David Mitchell and Mark Haddon.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I started skimming sex scenes in novels some time ago. This is not a prudish reaction. Like Waugh, I think many have a dutiful feeling about them, as if the author is saying, "I am hip and frank, so here's how it's done." The descriptions become repetitive or, like some of those above, ridiculous in their efforts to be creative. (Sounds a bit like sex itself.) I'm not suggesting an end to all fictional sex. Every now and then, of course, I can still be blown away.

After a few years as the neglected child of literature, poetry is enjoying some attention. Small publishers, poetry readings and slams are showcasing talent and soon there will be an Australian Poetry Centre in Melbourne.

"What persuaded us it was a good project is that it provides sustained attention to poetry," says CAL's chairman, Brian Johns. "Publishing has declined, critical attention has declined, but there is a good deal of public interest in poetry. The reality is that poetry's like opera; it has to be subsidised. Our $140,800 over a couple of years gives them the oppportunity to raise some sponsorship."

The centre will be established in Glenfern, a historic house in East St Kilda; it is seeking a director to start work in March. But the centre's brief is national, Johns says. Activities will include sending poets to regional schools and poetry centres, and boosting distribution of books and magazines.

This is the first fully professional organisation to represent poetry, says Ron Pretty, the foundation's director, "enabling it to take its rightful place among the major art forms".

A young Queensland poet, Nathan Shepherdson, was named winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize last weekend. He won the $12,500 prize for Eve 1528, a poem inspired by Lucas Cranach's painting composed on a trip to Italy in 2003.

Already the winner of the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize in 2004 and again this year, and also the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Award for an unpublished manuscript, Shepherdson has published his first book with UQP.

Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror is an elegy to his mother with lines such as, "you wore the same dress to my wedding and your funeral". Interestingly, another young Queenslander, Jaya Savige, won the 2004 Shapcott Award with Latecomers, a book inspired by his mother's death.

Highly commended in the Newcastle Prize were Sydney poet David Musgrave for a suite of poems, Open Water, and Novocastrian Judy Johnson, who is also local winner for Michelangelo's Daughter. Victoria's Philip Norton received the new media prize for Hypnosis.

David Musgrave has another life as a publisher. His year-old company Puncher & Wattmann has published poets Nick Riemer and Simon West and today (Saturday, December 2) launches collections by two Newcastle Prize winners - Westering by Peter Kirkpatrick and Montale: A Biographical Anthology by John Watson. (Friend in Hand Hotel, Glebe, 6pm.)

Most intriguing is Puncher & Wattmann's venture into fiction. Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything is a first novel by Alex Jones, a retired linguistics lecturer at the University of Sydney.

"The book reminded me of something I couldn't put my finger on," Musgrave says. "Umberto Eco is the closest I can think of but Eco is humourless. This is a very funny book." In fact, David Malouf has written a blurb for what he calls "a brilliant comic novel".

Don't ask for a plot summary: its many strands include penguins, Big Brother, semiotics, cooking and a man obsessed with Garner's work. Helen Garner declined Musgrave's invitation to launch the book so Catharine Lumby will launch it at the university's Woolley Building at 6pm on December 11.

Two books make up the very short shortlist for the 2006 Blake Dawson Waldron Prize for Business Literature: Packer's Lunch by Neil Chenoweth and Asbestos House by Gideon Haigh. Chosen from nine eligible entries, both have also held their own on other shortlists against general nonfiction, a great achievement in an often arid genre. Haigh won the Westfield/Waverley Library Prize; Chenoweth won a Queensland Premier's Award and this week's Walkley Non-fiction Book Award. The winner of the three-year-old BDW prize, worth $30,000, will be announced on April 18.

If you're shopping for children's books this Christmas, have a look at the nominations for Britain's 2006 Carnegie Medal. Among the 38 is The Dangerous Book for Boys, a wonderfully ironic boys-own compendium by Hal and Conn Iggulden, who will be here for Perth Writers' Week in February.

Also, Half Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer, known for Artemis Fowl; Chew on This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, a children's version of Fast Food Nation; and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne, a surprising Holocaust story which I bought last Christmas.